AZ Pandemic Numbers for the Week Ending August 21—A Worrying Jump in Cases

 

Here is the summary of Arizona pandemic numbers for the week just ended:


This is really not looking good. New cases for Maricopa County took a big jump, and statewide the increase is double what it was last week. The trend can be most clearly seen in the seven-day average of new cases:


I should mention that the value for the 25th is "imputed" (the average of the 24th and the 26th). Data was not available for the 25th due to an outage of the state dashboard. 

Anyway, that's a qualitative change on the 24th. It makes the line look more like an exponential curve (where the increase for a given day is more than the increase for the previous day.

We are also close to matching the peak in July of last year. That was 3,844 cases (seven-day average) on July 6th. The number yesterday was 3,741.  The way we are going, we will easily exceed the July 2020 peak number this week.

Safe to say the numbers did not peak in mid-August as Dr. Scott Gottlieb optimistically predicted at the end of July. At that time epidemiological models were predicting a peak in mid-October. If that's true this wave is going to be worse than the one a year ago—possibly a lot worse.

I can't understand, given these increases, why positive test percentage continues to decrease. The only sensible explanation is that the number of tests are going up faster than the number of new cases. I am going to try and check into this.

The one bit of good news is that hospitalizations continue to increase at a much slower pace than cases.  So the vaccines continue to do their job. 

Speaking of vaccines, here is the accelerometer:


That's an improvement over last week, but still a fractional percentage increase. It appears we are stalling at around half of Arizonans vaccinated. Clearly we need to try something different to encourage vaccinations. Former Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona has been tapped by the governor to do just that.

I certainly wish him luck, but I'm not encouraged by his first official communication. That was an op-ed that kissed the governor's ass by praising his—ahem—"steady hand" in dealing with the pandemic. 

I guess it's true that Ducey has been steady in promoting public illness. Due to his "steady hand," we're riding a new wave that looks to be worse than the one a year ago.

Top Image by Shutterbug75 from Pixabay

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